Case Study #1

- Undergrad Psy Class (see syllabus)
- Observe actual online class and compare the application of best practices
- Examine class syllabus
- Examine welcome message
- Survey student and instructor perception on the application of 7 principles and learning effectiveness

Setting

Blackboard LMS
Wimba environment (Virtual classroom) and tools (such as tracking number of people attending the class, feedback tools, commumication tools, desktop sharing)
1 instructor, [students: 75 (800am), 87 (815am), 100 (830am)]
Lesson title: Memory
instructor displayed a picture of himself

Class Proper

- chatting between students before class proper starts [Do you remember what they were talking about? We should keep notes of anything that is related to the class and the teaching.]
- sound check and started on time
- Use the archive function
- list the agenda for the class
- turn off chat function when class proper starts
- answer question when a student uses the "hand raise' function
- uses annotation tools to highlight and emphasize key points on shared slides
- activity 1 and 2 and 3 and 4: demo: students asked to recall a list of words after 2 minutes the instructor verbally presented the list. students were then asked to report the total number of words they can recall throught the chat room and polling.
- used chat function to get student to respond; turned off timely multiple times throughout the class.
- used polling tool to survey student response; polling tool provides a quick summary of answers.
- instructor constantly inform the students what he was doing to the students e.g. (typing, changing slides, etc.)
- relating new materials to content taught in previous class sessions.
- constantly check student understanding on his instruction from activity to activity (students raise hand, type questions in the chat room)
- Rely on various tools to support instruction (imply: instructor fluent with tools). [What are the tools?]
- Use jokes, where applicable, to support instruction {give a few examples]
- Showed class a Youtube video to support instruction
- constantly checking and reminding the classs the time remaining in the class.----[I wonder why?]
- showed a list of resources students can read up on their own to understand the topic better at the end of the class (students can read the articles from another learning portal)
- Remind students they can seek clarification from him after class through email and office hours.
- Students were using feedback tools such as emoticons & hand raise [How often? and How many used it, a rough percentage should do it.] Less than 10 occurence when prompted.

Class structure

#1. review previous class notes (1 minute; verbal with slides) -> #2. highlight what students need to focus for the next few classes (2 minutes, verbal with slides, talks about the test in 2 day's time) -> #3. lesson intro (?? minutes; verbal with slides) -> #4. content presentation (?? minutes; verbal with slides) -> #5. Q & A (?? minutes, how long before instructor check understanding? uses hand raise and chat function; 5th minute; ) -> #6. activity (?? minutes; verbal with slides; 1st recall-3minutes long followed by ; ) -> #7. repeat #4 through #6 -> #8. conclusion (?? minutes)

made archive available within one hour after the class is over.




Add a Summary Here: What best practices of online teaching was demonstrated in this session?
We'll then look for patterns after a few more observations.